Net Backlash=Fear of Freedom

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Net Backlash=Fear of Freedom

Real democracy - the kind that pervades the Net - is a frightening thing, especially to obsolete institutions.

Like all the best epiphanies, this one took me at a moment of relative calm. There I was, in an Austin restaurant listening to a dinner speech, when it hit me - the Internet Free Speech Backlash had arrived! And even though I'd been anticipating this backlash for quite a while, it was turning out to be far more fear-driven and intolerant than I could have guessed.

I was listening to Gary Chapman, who directs The 21st Century Project, a nonprofit program that explores post-Cold War government science and technology policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Like Chapman, I was set to speak the following day on the Austin campus. And, like Chapman, I'd been invited to give a preview of the conference events at an informal dinner gathering of members of Austin's Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Despite its name, the group has no formal connection with my organization of the same name.)

One problem - I had no idea what I was going to talk about. But Chapman, who's not a bad speaker, turned out to be a remarkable source of inspiration.

Chapman began by joking that his two recent articles in The New Republic, which criticized Wired magazine and Internet culture, had established him as the "antichrist of the Internet." It was clear that Chapman took a grim pride in his own iconoclasm.

But as the guy continued, his pride gave way to what I could only take to be a sort of fear and loathing of the Net. If the Internet is such a tool of democracy, Chapman wondered, why isn't it being used to organize activist projects? Instead, Chapman complained, net.folks too often choose to exercise their vaunted freedom of speech by focusing on "trivia and sleaze." This is troubling, he said, because the purpose of freedom of speech is to inspire and promote social and political progress - to "stimulate collective action." For Chapman, "effective, potent free speech" - the kind that leads to progressive political results in the physical world - is morally superior to the anarchic, selfish free speech of the Net, which is "palpably disengaged" (how does one "palpate" disengagement?) from the crises facing our nation.

But then it got worse: Chapman told the story of how one student had labored on the Internet to organize protests against the Republicans' Contract with America - with little result. The lesson to be drawn from this failure, he said, is that the Internet is inadequate as a political tool.

It was an odd conclusion. After all, there are many reasonable explanations for the protester's failure. Maybe his message wasn't clear or powerful enough. Or (much as it pains a yellow-dog Democrat like me to think it) perhaps the country is more conservative than either Chapman or the would-be protester thought.

Yet for Chapman, the obvious culprit in all this was the Internet itself.

And that's when it hit me - Chapman had fallen victim to the same fierce strain of reflexive technophobia that's responsible for the current hydra-headed social impulse to clamp down hard on the Internet. Behind Chapman's eagerness to condemn the tool I detected the panicky thread underlying virtually every new call for regulation or control of the Net: namely, that people are going to take this tool into their own hands and use it to say and do things we disapprove of!

It's a trendy sentiment. You see it in Senator James Exon's (D-Nebraska) vision of the Net as a glorified means of making obscene phone calls. You see it in Republican presidential candidate Arlen Specter's opportunistic Senate hearing on the availability of bomb-making information on the Internet. You see it in the prosecution of University of Michigan student Jake Baker, whose twisted little sex fantasies about a fellow student would never have gotten the attention of a US Attorney had they been written on paper rather than in electrons.

You even see it sometimes in the traditional media, which ought to know better. Immediately following the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City, I got dozens of calls from the press asking me whether there was legislation pending to ban bomb information on the Net. "No," I'd say. "Have you heard of such legislation?" No, they'd reply, but they were certain somebody, somewhere, was cooking it up.

Now, I don't think the reporters were acting as conscious anti-Net conspirators - individually, they were just trying to sniff out new angles or writing on assignment. But collectively they spread the dangerous-info-on-the-Net meme in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing despite the fact that there's no apparent connection between that horrific event and computer tech of any sort. For many journalists, "freedom of the press" is a privilege that can't be entrusted to just anybody. And yet the Net does just that. At least potentially, pretty much anybody can say anything online - and it is almost impossible to shut them up. The damned thing's out of control!

All it took for me to see the common thread of the Net backlash - fear of freedom - was a bracing draught of Chapman's dismissive contempt for Net culture in all its frivolity, diversity, and perversity.

You see, I can't buy this etiolated notion of a freedom that honors political speech over what Chapman's ready to dismiss as "trivia and sleaze." And I can't accept that anyone who's appalled by the range of opinion, temperament, and discourse on the Net has any understanding of what freedom of speech is all about.

Sure, real democracy - the kind that pervades the Net - is a frightening thing. Give an individual a voice, and you'll often find that it's irascible, unpredictable, even uncouth. Remember how our high-school civics classes taught us to embrace the principle of pluralism? Now the Net is forcing us to come to grips with its reality. In the long run, it's not really fear of the Net we have to transcend - it's fear of each other. n